Editing Guide

This editing guide explains the basics for anyone who is new to wiki editing with wikia or the Here Be Monsters Wiki. For the official Wikia crash course with the visual editor, you can check out the Help:Editing page.

To practice editing without having to worry about anything, check out our Sandbox page. You can use that to test your editing skills as much as you want!

Contents

Policies

Before you begin editing, make sure you browse over the Wikia Policies and guidelines for contributing. Anything you contribute should be your own. Since this wiki is based on a free-to-play game, any data gathered by you while playing the game is fine to contribute. If you gather information by using an outside site, please be sure to obtain permission from the site owner and reference their work with your contribution (provide a link).

Note on spoilers: If you are editing a page to add a spoiler, please use the Hints and Spoilers Template and copy/paste it over to the page you're editing. Including spoilers is fine as long as they are hidden by default (the template will hide them by default).

Getting Started

To edit a page, click the edit or edit this page button at the top of the page. To edit an individual section on a page, click the floating [Edit] link next to the section name.

After you've typed in your changes, click on the Preview button on the top right of the editing screen. Make sure any links you've added show up correctly, everything is spelled correctly and the spacing on pages is normal. If it looks fine, click Publish to finish your edit.

For more information on how to edit tables in the advanced editor, please see this link on the main Media Wiki Help site.

Categories

Categories on pages are really important to a wiki's organization. They create a list of all the items of a similar type in one area of the wiki. For instance, on this wiki we've added all the items the HBM calls 'Food'. Each page has the Food category listed on it. So, if I want to browse different food items listed on the wiki, I can just go to the Category:Food page and see what is there.

This is helpful if you're looking for an item and cant remember the name of it for searching, or want a quick overview of everything in a category.

Any time you edit a page, you will notice a box near the bottom of the right column of the page that says "Categories" and has a space for you to add category names. You can add several categories to the same page. For instance, if we're looking at Apple Pie, we know it in the 'Almanac', a 'cooking' item, and a 'food' item. So we can add the Almanac, cooking, and food categories to that page.

Things to look for when adding categories:

Date Item/Quest/etc was added - you should add "Update Month Day, Year" category to new pages

Location in the Almanac - These items should get "Almanac" and both subcategories in the Almanac listed as page categories

Quests & Characters - these pages need either "Quests" or "Characters" added to their categories

Quest Items - these are one time items that are given to your character during a quest and used to complete another quest. They will not be used for any other purpose or be able to gathered from anything but that one quest. A good example is the Peach Wood Sword

Quest Rewards - These are items that are given to your Folk for completing a quest as a reward and can be used immediately (you wont need them to complete a future quest). These tend to be special items like the Utensil Rack that can only be obtained by completing that quest and can not be collected outside of the quest.

Pictures

The pictures we add are all screen shots, usually of item pages in the Almanac or locations we visit. To take a screen shot, hold down the CTRL and Print Screen buttons on your keyboard. Print Screen (Prt Scrn) is usually above the insert/home keys on your keyboard. That will copy a picture of what your screen looks like, so then go into your favorite photo program (MS Paint, Photoshop, etc) and Paste the image (CTRL and V at the same time, or select 'paste' from the menu options). You can resize it and crop it however you want.

Most of the images we use are between 150 and 250 pixels (location images are 350-400px), so you may want to resize your images so they show up normally before you upload them.

To add any picture to the wiki, click on the Photo button in the edit page screen. It will show an upload screen and allow you to choose several different options about sizing and if you want to include a caption.

If you're adding a picture to a box on a page the formatting will be done for you (because we've already coded it to), but if you're adding one on a brand new page it may take a few tries to get it the way you want. Just use the 'Preview' button to make sure it looks how you want before you publish it.